Business

Michael Ovitz Offers a Revealing Retelling of His Hollywood Career

The title of Michael Ovitz’s autobiography significantly understates the scope of its ambitions. “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” does not just want to recast the popular image of the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, the influential talent agency of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it seeks to settle countless scores and re-litigate old arguments. The result is revealing and fascinating, although probably not precisely in the ways that Ovitz intended.

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By
Jonathan A. Knee
, New York Times

The title of Michael Ovitz’s autobiography significantly understates the scope of its ambitions. “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” does not just want to recast the popular image of the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, the influential talent agency of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it seeks to settle countless scores and re-litigate old arguments. The result is revealing and fascinating, although probably not precisely in the ways that Ovitz intended.

Robert Evans’ classic chronicle, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” provides the model for a successful memoir by a controversial Hollywood mogul who has fallen from grace. Evans, the former Paramount studio chief, is an unapologetic but lovable rogue. The narrative is compelling, if not always believable, because of the authenticity and consistency of his voice. Ovitz has had more than two decades to stew over being disowned by his former partners at CAA and then fired by his one-time best friend Michael Eisner, after briefly serving as his No. 2 at the Walt Disney Co. Even if Ovitz still had the five assistants he describes at CAA who kept his schedule and his stories straight, the sheer number of competing agendas being pursued do not allow for linear storytelling.

The inconsistencies are evident early on in a single sentence describing his childhood: “I always stood out academically, even if none of my teachers took particular notice or encouraged me.” How to believably assert both that one is an obvious prodigy and that no one remarked or helped?

This pattern repeats itself throughout the book. Ovitz brags that the motto of CAA was “no conflict, no interest” and then defends himself against charges of conflict of interest. He takes credit for bravely pushing through successful movie projects in which no one else believed but then justifies his involvement in a failure on the grounds that he did not have the confidence to fight choices he suspected would not work.

During the litigation that followed his dismissal from Disney, Eisner’s widely circulated emails described Ovitz as a “psychopath” and “habitual liar.” His defense to this charge in “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” is to change the traditional definition of lying: “Lying to me is a point-blank misstatement with no purpose in mind.” Given that Ovitz’s alleged fabrications have generally been quite purposeful, this novel definition would seem an attempt to leave him in the clear. Besides, Ovitz protests, they were never lies to him; they were the tools he needed to get his job done. In writing the autobiography, Ovitz faced the same challenge he overcame in getting Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money,” a sequel to the much earlier classic “The Hustler,” produced: “No one under thirty-five remembered” the original. When I polled a current MBA class at Columbia University, only three of the 75 students had any idea who Michael Ovitz was.

But this is unfair to the continuing relevance of Ovitz’s most remarkable accomplishment: creating a firm that for a brief time dominated in an industry that should resist domination.

As a study in the unusual personality traits required to pull this off, “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” represents a master class of sorts. Watching Ovitz simultaneously manage his clients and his partners while the going was good is something to behold: the strange fascination with gifting and clothing; the obsession with establishing bona fides in art and architecture; even the dissembling. It is not a package that could or should be replicated. But it all improbably worked for a time and might have gone on for longer if Ovitz had not convinced himself that he was destined for greater things.

And this is where Ovitz’s career, and to a lesser extent “Who Is Michael Ovitz?,” goes off the rails. All of us in service businesses — investment bankers, consultants, lawyers and the like — have a story about a colleague who decided he or she was wasted as a mere agent and should be a principal. These stories usually end in tears, for the colleague, for whoever they convinced to let them try their hand as a principal and most often, both. Successful service professionals must be good at one thing: sales. When they decide that sales are beneath them, bad things follow.

The point is not that salespeople are not capable of transitioning to business operators or investors. It is that the skills required to overachieve in those disciplines are markedly different. So some profound level of self-awareness is necessary to make such a switch. It requires at a minimum a respect for different capabilities and a willingness to do the hard work to acquire new expertise. And therein lies the problem. Self-awareness is not Ovitz’s strong suit.

Ovitz tells the story of making his former martial arts trainer, Steven Seagal, into a movie star only to be fired once his client becomes certain he should be an Academy-Award-winning director rather than an increasingly fleshy action hero. “He had fallen prey,” writes Ovitz without any suggestion that the criticism could be applied to his own situation, “to the entirely human delusion that if you succeed in one arena you can do anything.” Ovitz’s own delusions are on painful display during his failed negotiations to lead MCA/Universal and most strikingly during his brief, frenetic tenure at Disney. Ovitz is certainly correct that Eisner had set him up for failure and never really wanted a successor, but even Ovitz’s highly sanitized version of his time at Disney makes it clear how ill-suited he was for corporate leadership.

His efforts to justify the various deals he negotiated that Eisner subsequently vetoed only confirms how unmoored to reality Ovitz was and is. For instance, he complains that Eisner scuttled his “handshake agreement” to buy the book publisher Putnam for $350 million. He points out that the company, owned at the time by MCA/Universal, was quickly “snapped up” by Penguin and claims that today the asset would be worth “over ten times” what he could have had it for.

In fact, Penguin, even with significant cost savings not available to Disney, paid less than Ovitz offered and, although the combined Penguin Random House with almost $4 billion in revenue was recently valued at around $3.5 billion, Putnam (which at the time had less than $300 million in revenues) would have been lucky to hold its value.

Ovitz is not so shortsighted as to deal exclusively with the past. He also tries to endear himself to those who might be helpful in the future. Ignoring that the current Disney leadership has been as ruthless as the previous in dispatching potential successors, Ovitz argues that Robert Iger “has led Disney to new heights as CEO” by empowering the people around him and “erasing Eisner’s imprint.” He even claims to have ignored his boss’ directive to fire Iger while at Disney. Unable to restrain himself, Ovitz concludes that the real key to Iger’s success, however, was doing “more or less what I’d tried a decade earlier.”

The contrast between “The Kid Stays in the Picture” and “Who Is Michael Ovitz?” is best seen in the two books’ final sentences. The irreverent and unrepentant Evans signs off with a profoundly felt, profanity-laced version of “screw ‘em, screw ‘em all.” Ovitz, having acknowledged just enough mistakes to qualify as a repentant sinner, wants a second chance. “I miss the people,” he assures us.

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